Nathan Harden:

In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.
We’ve all heard plenty about the “college bubble” in recent years. Student loan debt is at an all-time high–an average of more than $23,000 per graduate by some counts–and tuition costs continue to rise at a rate far outpacing inflation, as they have for decades. Credential inflation is devaluing the college degree, making graduate degrees, and the greater debt required to pay for them, increasingly necessary for many people to maintain the standard of living they experienced growing up in their parents’ homes. Students are defaulting on their loans at an unprecedented rate, too, partly a function of an economy short on entry-level professional positions. Yet, as with all bubbles, there’s a persistent public belief in the value of something, and that faith in the college degree has kept demand high.
The figures are alarming, the anecdotes downright depressing. But the real story of the American higher-education bubble has little to do with individual students and their debts or employment problems. The most important part of the college bubble story–the one we will soon be hearing much more about–concerns the impending financial collapse of numerous private colleges and universities and the likely shrinkage of many public ones. And when that bubble bursts, it will end a system of higher education that, for all of its history, has been steeped in a culture of exclusivity. Then we’ll see the birth of something entirely new as we accept one central and unavoidable fact: The college classroom is about to go virtual.

Dylan Barth:

The main focus of this post is KA-Lite: a lightweight web app for hosting Khan Academy content from a local server, without the need for an Internet connection.
“Education is all a matter of building bridges.” – Ralph Ellison
I love Khan Academy. To me, it’s that band that I listened to way before it became popular and everybody else jumped on the bandwagon. I remember discovering Khan way back in December of 2006, when it was just a YouTube channel and I was a wee little high school sophomore struggling to pay attention in my pre-cal class. At the time, I didn’t know how lucky I was to have found those videos. Sal (I call him Sal, because deep down I feel like we’re buddies) always managed to break concepts down in such a concise and visually digestible way. If I didn’t get it the first time, I could play it over and over again until I understood it without the risk of ridicule. It was a relief. It spurred my interest in the material for the first time. And I remember thinking, “Man… I wish Sal could teach all of my classes.”
Fast forward 6 years. The Khan Academy has grown into a full-fledged non-profit organization with funding from entities like Google and The Gates Foundation. It has delivered 217,336,268 lessons to date. Anybody with an Internet connection can type http://www.khanacademy.org into their address bar and have instant access to over 3,600 high-quality lessons on topics ranging from Art History and American Civics to Calculus and Computer Programming. How awesome is that?

Art Aisner and Laura Houser:

Parents and school officials concerned with potentially sweeping education reform currently making its way through the Michigan legislature are invited to sound off at a series of informational meetings starting Tuesday across Oakland County.
Dave Randels, assistant director of the office of government relations and pupil services for Oakland Schools, will speak about Gov. Rick Snyder’s education funding proposals from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Doyle Center in Bloomfield Hills.
“Michigan is embarking on a very radical experiment with our children — one that is untested and untried,” an alert on the Bloomfield Hills Public Schools website read Monday. “We need to come together to learn about this movement and what we can do about it.”

Former Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad is now leading the Birmingham School District.

Maria Konnikova:

MEDITATION and mindfulness: the words conjure images of yoga retreats and Buddhist monks. But perhaps they should evoke a very different picture: a man in a deerstalker, puffing away at a curved pipe, Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself. The world’s greatest fictional detective is someone who knows the value of concentration, of “throwing his brain out of action,” as Dr. Watson puts it. He is the quintessential unitasker in a multitasking world.
More often than not, when a new case is presented, Holmes does nothing more than sit back in his leather chair, close his eyes and put together his long-fingered hands in an attitude that begs silence. He may be the most inactive active detective out there. His approach to thought captures the very thing that cognitive psychologists mean when they say mindfulness.
Though the concept originates in ancient Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese traditions, when it comes to experimental psychology, mindfulness is less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way. The formulation dates from the work of the psychologist Ellen Langer, who demonstrated in the 1970s that mindful thought could lead to improvements on measures of cognitive function and even vital functions in older adults.
Now we’re learning that the benefits may reach further still, and be more attainable, than Professor Langer could have then imagined. Even in small doses, mindfulness can effect impressive changes in how we feel and think — and it does so at a basic neural level.

Esther Cepeda

It’s “Too Many Tamales” season in selected classrooms. A contemporary classic by Gary Soto, it tells the story of Maria, a girl who loses her mother’s diamond ring as she and her family prepare tamales for their big holiday feast.
I discovered it with my class of first-graders when I taught English-language learners. Unfortunately, only my class experienced “Too Many Tamales.” As the holidays approached, the rest of the school read more “traditional” holiday books. Those students lost out.
My students would have missed out on themes the rest of their grade was involved in had I not insisted that the bilingual students be included in the general curriculum. The “mainstream” teachers thought this was bizarre, as if Hispanic students couldn’t possibly be expected to learn about the same topics as the other first-graders without a mountain of “culturally correct” learning materials.

Todd Zywicki:

The gruesome sexual abuse scandal and cover-up within Penn State’s football program that exploded during fall 2011 rocked the conscience of a community, spawned a raft of criminal indictments of university officials, and ended the careers of the university’s storied football coach Joe Paterno and the university’s long-serving president.
The severity of the depravity at Penn State renders the incident nearly unique. But the response of the university’s leadership–to downplay and cover-up the allegations–is not.
Based on my experience serving as an independent trustee on the Dartmouth Board of Trustees and my academic study of higher education governance, I believe that the cowardly response of Penn State’s leadership is consistent with how many university boards today would respond. I submit that the core principle animating the modern university is a fundamental dishonesty that subverts its core mission. Although the events at Penn State are extreme, they merely magnify the smaller dishonesty and lack of integrity that characterize the modern university.

Laura Waters:

Two weeks ago the big New Jersey education story was the CREDO report, which surveyed student outcomes in NJ’s charter schools and found that, while performance in most urban districts was mixed, the results in Newark were remarkable: for every year a Newark student is in a charter schools, she advances seven and a half months in reading and a full year in math compared to a student in a traditional Newark public school.
The CREDO report sparked much debate and some criticism, especially from those feel that Newark’s charters “cream off” kids who are less poor, female, and without special education or English language learning needs. (See Bruce Baker, for example.)

Louis Menand:

The French President’s emancipation proclamation regarding homework may give heart not only to les enfants de la patrie but to the many opponents of homework in this country as well–the parents and the progressive educators who have long insisted that compelling children to draw parallelograms, conjugate irregular verbs, and outline chapters from their textbooks after school hours is (the reasons vary) mindless, unrelated to academic achievement, negatively related to academic achievement, and a major contributor to the great modern evil, stress. M. Hollande, however, is not a progressive educator. He is a socialist. His reason for exercising his powers in this area is to address an inequity. He thinks that homework gives children whose parents are able to help them with it–more educated and affluent parents, presumably–an advantage over children whose parents are not. The President wants to give everyone an equal chance.
Homework is an institution roundly disliked by all who participate in it. Children hate it for healthy and obvious reasons; parents hate it because it makes their children unhappy, but God forbid they should get a check-minus or other less-than-perfect grade on it; and teachers hate it because they have to grade it. Grading homework is teachers’ never-ending homework. Compared to that, Sisyphus lucked out.

Via Laura Waters

Allen Ruff & Steve Horn, via a kind email:

A number of prestigious, primarily U.S.-based universities are quietly working with the authoritarian regime in Kazakhstan under the dictatorial rule of the country’s “Leader for Life,” Nursultan Nazarbayev.
In a project largely shaped and brokered by the World Bank in 2009 and 2010, the regime sealed deals with some ten major U.S. and British universities and scientific research institutes. They’ve been tasked to design and guide the specialized colleges at the country’s newly constructed showcase university.
As a result, scores of academics have flocked to the resource rich, strategically located country four times the size of Texas. They remain there despite the fact that every major international human rights monitor has cited the Nazarbayev regime for its continuing abuse of civil liberties and basic freedoms.
Kazakhstan now serves as a key hub for the application of the World Bank’s “knowledge bank” agenda, a vivid case study of the far-reaching nature of a corporate – and by extension, imperial – higher education agenda.

Ruth Mantell:

Paying for A’s can actually discourage some kids from working hard. It can create frustration and resentment among kids with siblings. In fact, if the ultimate goal is to encourage the character traits that will help children fulfill their potential throughout life, paying for A’s can fail.
“It comes down to knowing the child and what they are working through,” says Dan Keady, a certified financial planner and director of financial planning at financial-services firm TIAA-CREF.
Facts of Life
Almost half of parents pay kids at least $1 for getting an A, according to a July poll conducted for the American Institute of CPAs, a New York-based professional association. Among those who pay, the average reward for an A is more than $16.
“Paying for grades is one way to prepare them for adult life,” says Mark DiGiovanni, a certified financial planner in Grayson, Ga.
“One of the big facts of adult life is that you do get paid for performing well,” he says. “So this is a way of showing young people that when you do something well, you can get financially rewarded for it. And when you do something poorly, you don’t.”

Madison School District:

The Changing Landscape of Education describes the many transitions taking place in the next few years, in response to state and federal mandates for greater accountability, to prepare our students for college and careers, and secure better educational outcomes for schools and students.

Matthew DeFour:

Over the past two years the Madison School District has implemented increased safety measures at its schools, including locking school buildings during the day.
As of this school year, all of the district’s buildings are to be locked during the school day, district security coordinator Luis Yudice said. The district works constantly with police to address any potential threats to school safety.
“We have the expectation that if any schools have any hint of threatening behavior, they will direct that to me,” Yudice said. “We try to work at the front end of the problem, before those issues come into the school.”
Yudice addressed questions about building security at Madison schools Friday in the wake of a mass murder at a Connecticut elementary school.

Alan Borsuk

A broad shift is under way from fiction to nonfiction, propelled by the Common Core English and language arts standards that are being implemented in 46 states and the District of Columbia. It almost certainly will mean fewer classics, more historical documents, fewer personal essays, more analytical writing.
The nonfiction shift is the current center of attention in the changing world of reading instruction.
But it comes in the context of other big shifts: Reading lists that increasingly reflect a diverse population, changes in classroom techniques that promote more student participation, intense focus on how to get more children up to par in reading by third grade and more pressure for schools and teachers to meet accountability standards built largely around reading.
The Common Core standards are intended to provide consistency and quality across the country in what children learn. When it comes to reading, the standards call for fourth-graders to read 50% nonfiction and 50% fiction – and, for 12th-graders, 70% nonfiction and 30% fiction. It’s not possible to compare that to the past, but it clearly moves the needle toward nonfiction.
Why? In general, advocates say, nonfiction gives students better preparation for college and careers by developing such things as analytical skills. And too much of what kids read and write has been too easy and too self-indulgent.

Andrew Martin:

A decade-long spending binge to build academic buildings, dormitories and recreational facilities — some of them inordinately lavish to attract students — has left colleges and universities saddled with large amounts of debt. Oftentimes, students are stuck picking up the bill.
Overall debt levels more than doubled from 2000 to 2011 at the more than 500 institutions rated by Moody’s, according to inflation-adjusted data compiled for The New York Times by the credit rating agency. In the same time, the amount of cash, pledged gifts and investments that colleges maintain declined more than 40 percent relative to the amount they owe.
With revenue pinched at institutions big and small, financial experts and college officials are sounding alarms about the consequences of the spending and borrowing. Last month, Harvard University officials warned of “rapid, disorienting change” at colleges and universities.

Edward Tufte: “@EdwardTufte: ET’s Law of University Growth: Bureaucracy doubles every 12 years, while number of students + faculty remains constant.”

Chad Aldeman:

NCTQ’s new report on the state of state teacher pension plans is well worth your time. If you’re new to the pension issue, it does a great job of breaking down the issues in simple and clear language. If you know your way around defined benefit plans, there’s still lots of good resources on, for example, the number of states that made changes to their pension formulas over the last four years. And, if you only care about a particular state, it has lots of tables where you can find exactly how your home state is doing.
So go read it all and save it as a resource. For this blog, I want to pull out one of its main findings and show why it matters. Since 2009, 13 states have changed their vesting requirements, and 11 of those 13 made this period longer. The vesting period is amount of time a teacher must be employed before becoming eligible for pension benefits. If they meet the minimum vesting requirement, they’re eligible for a pension. If they don’t, they typically can get their own contributions back and some interest on those contributions, but they forfeit the contributions their employer made on their behalf.

Stephanie Lowden:

With all due respect to John Legend and Geoff Canada, firing teachers is not the solution to the achievement gap in Madison schools. The two spoke in Madison last week, prompting Friday’s article “Reformers: City schools need institutional change.”
I have been a substitute teacher in many classrooms since 2005 in Madison schools. What do I see?
Teachers who come early and stay late. Teachers who keep a stash of granola bars in their desks for the child who doesn’t make it to school on time for breakfast. Aides who lovingly attend to children with serious special needs.
I see 5-year-olds so out of control they can disrupt a classroom in minutes. Kids who live in their cars.

Madison Superintendent Jane Belmore (2.5MB PDF):

For the past four years, MMSD has been aware that the current implementation of balanced literacy, our core instructional program for literacy at the elementary level, has not resulted in all students making the progress necessary to meet grade level standards. The research shows that three key things are necessary for students to gain proficiency in the common core standards:

• a highly qualified teacher in the classroom

• a strong instructional leader in the school and
• access to an aligned, guaranteed and viable curriculum (Marzano, 2003).

It is clear that MMSD has two out of these three in place: highly qualified teachers and strong instructional leaders. To maintain and develop strong teachers and leaders need well planned, embedded, ongoing professional development. The
School Support Team and Instructional Research Teachers provide us the mechanism for delivering this necessary professional development.
What is needed is a decision about a guaranteed, viable core instructional curriculum that is cohesive across all 32 elementary schools. All student will benefit from consistency across grades levels and schools. Our students from mobile families must have the security and consistency that this core will provide.

60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use.
When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before.

Laura Waters:

New Jersey School Boards Association has no truck with a new DOE proposal that would let school superintendents unilaterally call for school board meetings. Currently, meetings are held either by preapproved schedules, by board presidents, or through consensus of the board.

Here’s Mike Vrancik, director of NJSBA’s Governmental Relations Department:

Mike Antonucci:

There is a popular bumper sticker that reads, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” It might surprise you to learn that ignorance is making education more expensive.
The annual Education Next-PEPG Survey, published in Education Next’s Winter issue, unpacks the public’s knowledge of education issues and quantifies just how much ignorance affects one’s opinions on various topics – the most important of which are education spending and teacher pay.
Figure 8 shows what happens to support for increased public school spending after you tell people what we currently spend:

Dee J. Hall, via a kind reader’s email

From substitute teachers to cabinet secretaries, thousands of public employees in Wisconsin who retired in recent years returned to work, allowing them to earn both a paycheck and a state pension, according to a Legislative Audit Bureau report released Friday.
And while many employees and employers like the arrangement, the system can be abused, the report found.
The state lawmaker who blew the whistle on the practice last year, Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, thinks it’s time for it to be abolished.
“Steve is pretty emphatic — he thinks the report indicates double dipping needs to end,” Nass spokesman Mike Mikalsen said.
But Employee Trust Funds Secretary Robert Conlin said the audit bureau report supports continuation of the practice but with measures to crack down on those who cheat the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) by pre-arranging their return to government service. In a letter responding to the audit, Conlin said the Legislature should consider lengthening the mandatory 30-day separation between retirement and re-employment to cut down on abuse.
“The re-hire of WRS annuitants is a lawful practice that, as noted in the audit, appears to serve the needs of retirees and employers,” he said.

From the full report [1MB PDF] Page 35: “We received 1,169 responses to our survey, which is an 82.1 percent response rate. [….] Milwaukee Public Schools and the City of Madison responded, but Madison Metropolitan School District did not, even though we contacted it about responding to the survey.”

Matthew DeFour, via a kind reader’s email

The report card scores of nearly all Madison schools will be reduced slightly after the district discovered it had reported incorrect student attendance data to the state and revised it.
In most cases the new, lower scores — which the Department of Public Instruction plans to update on its website next week — have no impact on the rating each Madison school receives on the report card. But six schools will be downgraded to a lower category.
Randall and Van Hise elementaries, which were rated in the highest performance category, are now in the second-highest tier. Olson and Chavez elementaries are now in the middle tier. And Mendota and Glendale elementaries are in the second-lowest tier.
The corrections — prompted by a State Journal inquiry — have no immediate practical ramifications, though the implications are significant as state leaders contemplate tying school funding to the report card results.
Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, said it’s “extremely important” that the data used to rate schools is accurate. The report cards are part of the state’s new school accountability system, and DPI has proposed directing resources to schools struggling in certain categories.
“The report cards are only as good as the data that goes into them,” he said.

Props to DeFour and the Wisconsin State Journal for digging and pushing.
Related: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools”.
Where does the Madison School District Get its Numbers from?
Global Academic Standards: How we Outrace the Robots and www.wisconsin2.org.
An Update on Madison’s Use of the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) Assessment, including individual school reports. Much more on Madison and the MAP Assessment, here.
I strongly support diffused governance of our public schools. One size fits all has outlived its usefulness.

James Causey:

Kenisha Johnson will graduate from the not-for-profit Ottawa University with a bachelor’s degree in human resources in January. She has been trying to find a job in her field for more than a year.
In the process, she has applied for more than 50 jobs. She only received two calls.
To make matters worse, she was laid off from her last job at a collection agency. Ideally, Johnson would like to land a job in her field of study, but that may be unlikely. Only about 20% of recent college grads were lucky enough to find work in their fields.
The problem Johnson and others like her face is that the tight job market has made companies very selective. And while she will soon have a degree in hand, she lacks on-the-job experience.
“It’s discouraging, but right now I’m willing to take any kind of job because I do have bills to pay,” Johnson said.

Valerie Strauss:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, architect of a statewide voucher program that sends public money to religious schools which teach that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, ventured to the Brookings Institution in Washington to present his alternative education universe. Jindal, a rising figure in the Republican Party, spoke for more than an hour defending his voucher program — which was declared unconstitutional by a Lousiana state judge who said it improperly diverts public state and local money to private institutions — without actually mentioning the word “vouchers,” instead using euphemisms such as “scholarships.” Quite a feat.

Evan Miller:

They seem to agree on one thing: from a workaday perspective, math is essentially useless. Lisp programmers (we are told) should be thankful that mathematics was used to work out the Lambda Calculus, but today mathematics is more a form of personal enlightenment than a tool for getting anything done.
This view is mistaken. It has prevailed because it is possible to be a productive and well-compensated programmer — even a first-rate hacker — without any knowledge of science or math. But I think that most programmers who are serious about what they do should know calculus (the real kind), linear algebra, and statistics. The reason has nothing to do with programming per se — compilers, data structures, and all that — but rather the role of programming in the economy.
One way to read the history of business in the twentieth century is a series of transformations whereby industries that “didn’t need math” suddenly found themselves critically depending on it. Statistical quality control reinvented manufacturing; agricultural economics transformed farming; the analysis of variance revolutionized the chemical and pharmaceutical industries; linear programming changed the face of supply-chain management and logistics; and the Black-Scholes equation created a market out of nothing. More recently, “Moneyball” techniques have taken over sports management. There are many other examples.

Jim Fallows:

There are other topics to catch up on, but by serendipity three similar-themed responses on the UCal Logo Wars arrived at practically the same moment.
One by one, and even more powerfully in combination. they make the excellent point that this is not just about a logo and whether you prefer the “classic stateliness” of the old look or the “bold simplicity” of the new. These writers argue that this seemingly silly controversy in fact raises timely and surprisingly sweeping questions about the future identity, role, and financial underpinnings of great universities. I turn it over to the readers:
Embracing the new. One reader in North Carolina says that the people in charge at UC are merely trying to get ahead of technological and market reality:

Jay Matthews:

Teachers appear to be changing their minds about how they should be hired, assessed, paid and dismissed. This merits attention because we cannot have good schools if teachers are not happy with their compensation and working conditions.
Two new surveys show that teachers, particularly those new to the profession, are friendly to several proposed reforms. The American Federation of Teachers has even endorsed the equivalent of a lawyer’s bar exam for education school graduates.
It’s possible that nothing may come of this. A surge in non-teacher jobs for those with teacher skills or a sharp drop in teacher retirement benefits could leave school districts still scrounging for people with the skill and energy to raise student achievement. But teachers seem to be leaning toward new ways of supporting their work.
The education-policy group Teach Plus looked at teachers with 10 or fewer years of experience compared with those with 11 or more years. The think tank Education Sector compared teachers with fewer than five years experience with those with more than 20 years. Teach Plus used an online poll of 1,015 self-selected teachers, less reliable than the Education Sector’s random sample of 1,100 teachers.

Kevin Carey:

LAST month The Chronicle of Higher Education published a damning investigation of college athletes across the nation who were maintaining their eligibility by taking cheap, easy online courses from an obscure junior college.
In just 10 days, academically deficient players could earn three credits and an easy “A” from Western Oklahoma State College for courses like “Microcomputer Applications” (opening folders in Windows) or “Nutrition” (stating whether or not the students used vitamins). The Chronicle quoted one Big Ten academic adviser as saying, “You jump online, finish in a week and half, get your grade posted, and you’re bowl-eligible.”
On the face of it, this is another sad but familiar story of the big-money intercollegiate-athletics complex corrupting the ivory tower. But it also reveals a larger, more pervasive problem: there are no meaningful standards of academic quality in higher education. And the more colleges and universities move their courses online, the more severe the problem gets.

Chris Cook:

UK universities recruited 54,000 fewer UK and EU students this academic year following the rise in tuition fees, according to the university admissions service, with less prestigious universities suffering the worst of the drop.
The 11 per cent decline in student numbers implies that universities, which had incomes of £27bn last year, could have lost out on £400m of tuition fees, had they been able to sustain the same recruitment levels as last year.
Lifting the fee cap in England from £3,375 to £9,000 was one of the coalition’s most controversial policies, but concerns that poorer students would be particularly deterred have not been realised.
The new figures, released by Ucas, the university courses manager, reveal that the number of UK students from the fifth of households least likely to go to university fell by only 2.4 per cent – roughly in line with demographic change.

Karen Yi:

The Florida Department of Education may have said yes to Tony Bennett as its new commissioner of education, but parents and teachers in the community are pushing back with a resounding no.
“We’re in big trouble,” said Lisa Goldman, founder of Testing is Not Teaching, a Palm Beach County school group.
Bennett, Indiana’s outgoing state schools superintendent, was chosen unanimously Wednesday to replace Chancellor of Public Schools Pam Stewart. She served as interim commissioner after Gerard Robinson resigned in August.

Elizabeth Baier:

When Jhosi Martinez thinks of college, she remembers the words of her father.
“He’s always wanted me to graduate and he’s always wanted me to continue and go to college and become someone else,” the Northfield High School senior said.
Jhosi’s dad never graduated from high school. Neither did her mom nor her older sister. Her family is like that of tens of thousands of Mexicans who have moved to greater Minnesota in search of better opportunities.
Many of those families represent a persistent achievement gap between white students and students of color that Minnesota education have long grappled with.

Quentin Hardy:

Jobs like that are likely to be well worth having. But who says those robot operators have to be United States-based, just because the machines are? In a world like that, I asked Mr. Schmidt, what are the chances that the United States can expect to have unemployment of 6 percent or even lower?
“I don’t think anyone can say the answer, but we can state the risks,” Mr. Schmidt said. “The way to combat it is education, which has to work for everyone, regardless of race or gender. You’ll have global competition for all kinds of jobs.”
Understanding this, he said, should be America’s “Sputnik moment,” which like that 1957 Russian satellite launch gives the nation a new urgency about education in math and science. “The president could say that in five years he wants the level of analytic education in this country – STEM education in science, technology, engineering and math, or economics and statistics – has to be at a level of the best Asian countries.”
Asian nations, Mr. Schmidt said, are probably going to proceed with their own increases in analytic education. “Employment is going to be a global problem, not a U.S. one,” he said.

I agree with Schmidt on global standards. Learn more about Wisconsin’s challenges at www.wisconsin2.org.
A few background articles on Google Chairman Eric Schmidt: William Gibson:

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.
Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

Nicholas Carr:

In the wake of Google’s revelation last week of a concerted, sophisticated cyber attack on many corporate networks, including its own Gmail service, Eric Schmidt’s recent comments about privacy become even more troubling. As you’ll recall, in a December 3 CNBC interview, Schmidt said, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”
For a public figure to say “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” is, at the most practical of levels, incredibly rash. You’re essentially extending an open invitation to reporters to publish anything about your life that they can uncover. (Ask Gary Hart.) The statement also paints Schmidt as a hypocrite. In 2005, he threw a legendary hissy fit when CNET’s Elinor Mills, in an article about privacy, published some details about his residence, his finances, and his politics that she had uncovered through Google searches. Google infamously cut off all contact with CNET for a couple of months. Schmidt didn’t seem so casual about the value of privacy when his own was at stake.

Motoko Rich:

Fourth- and eighth-grade students in the United States continue to lag behind students in several East Asian countries and some European nations in math and science, although American fourth graders are closer to the top performers in reading, according to test results released on Tuesday.
Fretting about how American schools compare with those in other countries has become a regular pastime in education circles. Results from two new reports, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, are likely to fuel further debate.
South Korea and Singapore led the international rankings in math and fourth-grade science, while Singapore and Taiwan had the top-performing students in eighth-grade science. The United States ranked 11th in fourth-grade math, 9th in eighth-grade math, 7th in fourth-grade science and 10th in eighth-grade science.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org.

Jay Matthews:

Don Horrigan, former priest turned public school educator, thought Prince George’s County was a splendid district for an experiment beginning in 1991, requiring all ninth-graders to take Algebra I and all 10th-graders to take geometry. The superintendent and school board were for it. Parents seemed excited.
But when Prince George’s became one of seven districts nationwide to pilot the College Board’s Equity 2000 program, many teachers in the district thought it was too much. Sure, they said, students could learn algebra and geometry eventually, but why so soon? They thought 42 percent of Prince George’s ninth-graders were taking remedial arithmetic because they weren’t ready for anything more.
“It is unwise to push a child — especially a slower-paced learner — who is not ready,” a Prince George’s high school math department chair told researchers Carolyn DeMeyer Harris and Jessica L. Turner. “I believe that when we push them we make them feel like failures when in actuality it was merely a timing issue.”
According to Harris and Turner, who worked for the Alexandria-based Human Resources Research Organization and wrote a report on Equity 2000, one Prince George’s teacher told a supervisor that the program was another loser. “We’re like little pigs at the trough waiting for you to throw more slop at us, and then we wait for it to go away,” the teacher said.
In my new book about Equity 2000, “The War Against Dummy Math,” I devote a chapter to the battle in Prince George’s. It explores clashing attitudes toward acceleration that are still with us and how very long it takes for student achievement to catch up with expectations.

Tess Rinearson:

It’s CSEdWeek, everyone! CSEdWeek is a nationally recognized celebration of K-12 computer science education. This week, CSEdWeek is December 9 to December 15, 2012.
Now, I am by no means an expert on computer science education. But I, along with several of my friends, started programming in middle school. I’m grateful for that. I truly think that that was the right time to be introduced.
Unfortunately, not many schools teach computer science as part of their formal curriculum. I couldn’t find statistics on middle school CS, but, at the high school level, only 27% of American high schools teach rigorous computer science courses. I’m sure the number for middle schools is stunningly small.
But you don’t need a “formal” introduction to CS. Really, a homegrown introduction to computer science is just as good (if not better). I want to share some ideas on introducing your daughter/son/sister/brother/niece/nephew/cousin/friend to computer science. (These were all suggestions that I made via email to a family friend who wanted ideas on how to get his 12 year old son involved with computer science.)

AnnaMaria Andriotis:

While $199 might cover just a single credit (or much less) at a typical college, the same fee buys a month of unlimited classes at New Charter University, one of two online schools by startup firm UniversityNow. The pricing structure is similar to online college course provider StraighterLine’s model, launched in 2008, which charges $99 per month of enrollment, plus $49 per class.
By creating the college version of unlimited data plans, experts say for-profit schools aim to get a leg up on the competition. In recent years, for-profit colleges have come under fire by students and Congress for their excessive tuition costs and the large number of students who drop out and default on their loans. After growing every year for the past decade, enrollment in private, for-profit colleges fell for the first time in 2011 by 3%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. As demand drops, so does “their ability to charge high tuition,” says Rob MacArthur, president of Alternative Research Services, which has tracked for-profit colleges. For their part, both the companies say their goals are to offer a quality higher education while lowering costs for families. “Our model isn’t to spend a lot of money on marketing and charge you on the back end,” says Gene Wade, co-founder and CEO of UniversityNow.

One Teacher’s Perspective:

Much ado has been made about a proposed teacher dress code for my school district as non-teacher leaders formulate a new employee handbook to replace the expiring teacher contract.
A few weeks ago, school leaders unveiled a three-page draft of a proposed dress code for school employees to replace the current one-line (“wear appropriate dress”) policy. The proposed draft has been met with some push back from educators. The push back has been met with some push back. The teacher dissent is viewed as much ado about nothing by some school leaders. The dressing up of teachers feels like a dressing down.
Undoubtedly, the current employee handbook discussions distract all of us from the eightball of school reform. Nonetheless, between nothing and the eightball is a worthwhile discussion about professionalism in public education.

Mark Niquette, Michael B. Marois & Rodney Yap

The result isn’t only a heavier burden on California taxpayers. As higher expenses competed for fewer dollars, per- pupil funding of the state’s public schools dropped to 35th nationally in 2009-2010 from 22nd in 2001-2002. Californians have endured recurring budget deficits throughout the past decade and now face the country’s highest debt and Standard & Poor’s lowest credit rating for a U.S. state.
The story of one prison psychiatrist shows how pay largesse has spread.

Related news from the “too big to fail” banks.
The key, of course, is to grow the tax base. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel takes a look at the challenges Wisconsin’s paper industry faces from China.

Erin Richards:

Long-simmering resentment over a rule that requires Milwaukee Public Schools employees to live in the city may resurface this week when the School Board considers modifying the district’s long-standing residency rule.
Spurring the discussion is the imminent staffing crisis the district faces – it needs to recruit at least 750 new teachers and school leaders to replace a larger-than-usual crop of retirements expected at the end of this year, all on the back edge of a housing crisis that’s made it more difficult for many people to sell their homes or purchase new ones.
To ease the transition, the administration is proposing extending the time allowed for new employees to establish residency in the district from one year to three years from the point of hire. The board’s Committee on Legislation, Rules and Policies is scheduled to discuss the plan Thursday.
But the larger question may be whether that’s enough of a rule change to attract – and keep – the kind of talented educators the district needs.
“The lack of teachers for next year puts us in a different place than we’ve been in the past,” board member Terry Falk said. “One thing we know we can’t do is dramatically increase salaries, or offer some kind of signing bonus.”

Yong Zhao:

“America’s Woeful Public Schools: TIMSS Sheds Light on the Need for Systemic Reform”[1]
“Competitors Still Beat U.S. in Tests”[2]
“U.S. students continue to trail Asian students in math, reading, science”[3]
These are a few of the thousands of headlines generated by the release of the 2011 TIMSS and PIRLS results today. Although the results are hardly surprising or news worthy, judging from the headlines, we can expect another global wave of handwringing, soul searching, and calls for reform. But before we do, we should ask how meaningful these scores and rankings are.
“Numbers don’t lie,” many may say but what truth do they tell? Look at the following numbers:

Valerie Strauss has more.

Larry Winkler kindly emailed the chart pictured above.

Where have all the Students gone?

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin:

We are not interested in the development of new charter schools. Recent presentations of charter school programs indicate that most of them do not perform to the level of Madison public schools. I have come to three conclusions about charter schools. First, the national evidence is clear overall, charter schools do not perform as well as traditional public schools. Second where charter schools have shown improvement, generally they have not reached the level of success of Madison schools. Third, if our objective is to improve overall educational performance, we should try proven methods that elevate the entire district not just the students in charter schools. The performance of non-charter students in cities like Milwaukee and Chicago is dismal.
In addition, it seems inappropriate to use resources to develop charter schools when we have not explored system-wide programming that focuses on improving attendance, the longer school day, greater parental involvement and combating hunger and trauma.
We must get a better understanding of the meaning of ‘achievement gap.’ A school in another system may have made gains in ‘closing’ the achievement gap, but that does not mean its students are performing better than Madison students. In addition, there is mounting evidence that a significant portion of the ‘achievement gap’ is the result of students transferring to Madison from poorly performing districts. If that is the case, we should be developing immersion programs designed for their needs rather than mimicking charter school programs that are more expensive, produce inadequate results, and fail to recognize the needs of all students.
It should be noted that not only do the charter schools have questionable results but they leave the rest of the district in shambles. Chicago and Milwaukee are two systems that invested heavily in charter schools and are systems where overall performance is unacceptable.

Related links:

• Notes and links on the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School. [Kaleem Caire video interview]
• Comparing Milwaukee Public and Voucher Schools’ Per Student Spending
• When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before (2005)
• “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!
• Paul Soglin notes and links.
• Madison School District Open Enrollment Leavers Report, 2012-13 (2009 Open Enrollment Leaver Survey)
• Paul Vallas visits Madison; Enrollment Growth: Suburban Districts vs. Madison 1995-2012
• Where does MMSD get its numbers from?
• 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use
• Minneapolis teacher’s union approved to authorize charter schools

I am unaware of Madison School District achievement data comparing transfer student performance. I will email the Madison School Board and see what might be discovered.
Pat Schnieder:

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin has some pretty strong ideas about how to improve academic achievement by Madison school children. Charter schools are not among them.
In fact, Madison’s ongoing debate over whether a charter school is the key to boosting academic achievement among students of color in the Madison Metropolitan School District is distracting the community from making progress, Soglin told me.
He attended part of a conference last week sponsored by the Urban League of Greater Madison that he says overstated the successes elsewhere of charter schools, like the Urban League’s controversial proposed Madison Preparatory Academy that was rejected by the Madison School Board a year ago.
“A number of people I talked with about it over the weekend said the same thing: This debate over charter schools is taking us away from any real improvement,” Soglin said.
Can a new committee that Soglin created — bringing together representatives from the school district, city and county — be one way to make real progress?

The City of Madison’s Education Committee, via a kind reader’s email. Members include: Arlene Silveira, Astra Iheukemere, Carousel Andrea S. Bayrd, Erik Kass, Jenni Dye, Matthew Phair, Maya Cole and Shiva Bidar-Sielaff.

Grace Hood:

Welcome to the 21st century classroom: a world where students watch lectures at home — and do homework at school. It’s called classroom flipping, and it’s slowly catching on in schools around the country.
When Jessica Miller, a high school sophomore in rural Bennett, Colo., sits down to do her chemistry homework, she pulls out her notebook. Then she turns on an iPad to watch a video podcast. Whenever the instructor changes the slide, Miller pauses the video and writes down everything on the screen.
Miller can replay parts of the chemistry podcast she doesn’t understand, and fast forward through those that make sense. Then she takes her notes to class where her teacher can review them.
Back in the classroom, chemistry teacher Jennifer Goodnight walks up and down the rows of desks giving verbal quizzes, guiding students through labs and answering questions.

Amar Toor:

Widespread adoption of robotics has certainly lowered production costs around the globe, though it remains unclear whether a similar surge would help spur American tech manufacturing. Some say automation will be at the core of Apple’s plan to bring some Mac production back to the US, noting that the $100 million initiative could prove the feasibility of a robotics-based manufacturing model.
But labor costs are just one part of the equation. Companies like Apple currently depend on a complex, and well-ingrained supply chain, anchored largely in Asia. With some exceptions, most of Apple’s parts are sourced from within the same geographic area, making it relatively easy to orchestrate and implement rapid changes in a product’s design. Large scale Chinese manufacturing therefore allows Apple to execute orders with greater speed and flexibility, as the New York Times reported earlier this year.
Woo struck a similar chord last week, when Foxconn announced plans to expand operations to North America. In an interview with Bloomberg, Woo said the move came in response to demands for “Made in USA” products, though he acknowledged that the “supply chain is one of the biggest challenges for US expansion.” Overcoming this obstacle, Woo said, would require Foxconn to harvest American engineering — hinting, perhaps, at a more robotics-driven future. “Any manufacturing we take back to the U.S. needs to leverage high-value engineering talent there in comparison to the low-cost labor of China,” the spokesman said.

Related: Madison & US Districts vs the world.

Josh Noble:

Nayaka sat wrapped in a blanket and an extra set of monk’s robes, shivering in his Swiss hotel room. He pulled three hats on to his shaved head, and wound a thick woollen scarf around his face. The temperature outside was probably in the mid-teens – after all, it was only September. Yet it was the coldest he had ever been.
In spite of the late hour, there was no way he was going to bed. On the other side of the world, tens of thousands of his countrymen had taken to the streets in what many people thought was the start of a revolution, and an end to Myanmar’s military dictatorship. Alongside the crowds of students marched thousands of his fellow Buddhist monks, decked out in their burnt orange robes and red velvet sandals. But U Nayaka would watch it all unfold on the TV news. It was perhaps fitting. U Nayaka (“U” is a Burmese honorific) has spent the past 20 years trying to avoid politics. Instead he has devoted himself to being the headmaster of one of the country’s largest schools, Phaung Daw Oo, where he and his brother help to educate more than 6,000 impoverished children every day. (His visit to Switzerland in late 2007 was for an international education conference.) Yet despite his distaste for politics, U Nayaka – and many others like him – are now key players in the country’s move towards democracy.

Sandy Banks:

I was prepared for the dog-and-pony show — the choreographed “reveal” of a school makeover that’s been in the works for years.
I didn’t expect much beyond a grown-up version of show-and-tell. But I came anyway because I have a soft spot for Jordan High in Watts.
I’ve spent a decade tracking the school’s efforts to improve; watched reformers arrive with big plans and leave with broken dreams.
The school’s problems, they’d say, are too deep and expensive to fix; too intertwined with a neighborhood that will always be warped by dysfunction and poverty.
But on Wednesday, state schools Supt. Tom Torlakson visited the school with certificates announcing its improvement. Jordan’s 93-point jump on the state’s academic performance index was the biggest of any urban high school in California this year.

Richard Gonzales:

More than 200 school districts across California are taking a second look at the high price of the debt they’ve taken on using risky financial arrangements. Collectively, the districts have borrowed billions in loans that defer payments for years — leaving many districts owing far more than they borrowed.
In 2010, officials at the West Contra Costa School District, just east of San Francisco, were in a bind. The district needed $2.5 million to help secure a federally subsidized $25 million loan to build a badly needed elementary school.
Charles Ramsey, president of the school board, says he needed that $2.5 million upfront, but the district didn’t have it.

Justin Pope:

Compensation for private college presidents has continued to drift upward, while the number crossing the $1 million barrier — a signal of prestige, and a magnet for criticism — held steady at 36, according to a new survey.
The latest annual compilation by The Chronicle of Higher Education covers data from 2010, due to lag time in the release of federal tax information. That year, median compensation for the 494 presidents in the survey — leaders of institutions with budgets of at least $50 million — was $396,649, or 2.8 percent higher than in last year’s survey. But median base salary fell slightly, by less than 1 percent.
The highest paid was Bob Kerrey, who was president of The New School in New York until December 2010 before returning to Nebraska, where he made an unsuccessful run to return to the U.S Senate. Kerrey’s total compensation was valued at just over $3 million. His base salary was just over $600,000, but he received the remainder in the form of a retention bonus, deferred compensation and other benefits.

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Jess Bidgood:

Budget cuts have eliminated about 95 full-time teachers from the school district here over the past year, swelling class sizes and prompting parents to cry foul.
“We had students sitting on the floor with a clipboard,” said Jim O’Connell, the president of the Parent-Teacher Organization at Hillside Middle School. “It’s one degree separated from a 1700s classroom with chalk and a slate.”
Officials, seeking an overhaul, began to wonder if a 21st-century technology might help allay their struggles: having some students take courses online during the school day, without a teacher physically present.
But a plan to institute “blended learning labs,” which allow students to do just that, is stoking concern among parents and teachers. Some doubt the efficacy of online learning. Others say the proposed solution barely scratches the surface of systemic problems here.

Ron Unz:

Harvard only improved its standing during the successful American postwar decades, and by its 350th anniversary in 1986 was almost universally recognized as the leader of the world’s academic community. But over the decade or two which followed, it quietly embarked upon a late-life career change, transforming itself into one of the world’s largest hedge funds, with some sort of school or college or something attached off to one side for tax reasons.
The numbers tell the story. Each September, Harvard’s 6,600 undergraduates begin their classes at the Ivy-covered walls of its traditional Cambridge campus owing annual tuition of around $37,000 for the privilege, up from just $13,000 in 1990. Thus, over the last two decades, total tuition income (in current dollars) has increased from about $150 million to almost $250 million, with a substantial fraction of this list-price amount being discounted in the form of the university’s own financial aid to the families of its less wealthy students.
Meanwhile, during most of these years, Harvard’s own endowment has annually grown by five or ten or even twenty times that figure, rendering net tuition from those thousands of students a mere financial bagatelle, having almost no impact on the university’s cash-flow or balance-sheet position. If all the students disappeared tomorrow–or were forced to pay double their current tuition–the impact would be negligible compared to the crucial fluctuations in the mortgage-derivatives market or the international cost-of-funds index.
A very similar conclusion may be drawn by examining the expense side of the university’s financial statement. Harvard’s Division of Arts and Sciences–the central core of academic activity–contains approximately 450 full professors, whose annual salaries tend to average the highest at any university in America. Each year, these hundreds of great scholars and teachers receive aggregate total pay of around $85 million. But in fiscal 2004, just the five top managers of the Harvard endowment fund shared total compensation of $78 million, an amount which was also roughly 100 times the salary of Harvard’s own president. These figures clearly demonstrate the relative importance accorded to the financial and academic sides of Harvard’s activities.

Michael Knox Beran, via Will Fitzhugh:

Emerging as a force in American education a century ago, social studies was intended to remake the high school. But its greatest effect has been in the elementary grades, where it has replaced an older way of learning that initiated children into their culture [and their History?] with one that seeks instead to integrate them into the social group. The result was a revolution in the way America educates its young. The old learning used the resources of culture to develop the child’s individual potential; social studies, by contrast, seeks to adjust him to the mediocrity of the social pack.
Why promote the socialization of children at the expense of their individual development? A product of the Progressive era, social studies ripened in the faith that regimes guided by collectivist social policies could dispense with the competitive striving of individuals and create, as educator George S. Counts wrote, “the most majestic civilization ever fashioned by any people.” Social studies was to mold the properly socialized citizens of this grand future. The dream of a world regenerated through social planning faded long ago, but social studies persists, depriving children of a cultural rite of passage that awakened what Coleridge called “the principle and method of self-development” in the young.
The poverty of social studies would matter less if children could make up its cultural deficits in English [and History?] class. But language instruction in the elementary schools has itself been brought into the business of socializing children and has ceased to use the treasure-house of culture to stimulate their minds. As a result, too many students today complete elementary school with only the slenderest knowledge of a culture that has not only shaped their civilization but also done much to foster individual excellence.
In 1912, the National Education Association, today the largest labor union in the United States, formed a Committee on the Social Studies. In its 1916 report, The Social Studies in Secondary Education, the committee opined that if social studies (defined as studies that relate to “man as a member of a social group”) took a place in American high schools, students would acquire “the social spirit,” and “the youth of the land” would be “steadied by an unwavering faith in humanity.” This was an allusion to the “religion of humanity” preached by the French social thinker Auguste Comte, who believed that a scientifically trained ruling class could build a better world by curtailing individual freedom in the name of the group. In Comtian fashion, the committee rejected the idea that education’s primary object was the cultivation of the individual intellect. “Individual interests and needs,” education scholar Ronald W. Evans writes in his book The Social Studies Wars, were for the committee “secondary to the needs of society as a whole.”
The Young Turks of the social studies movement, known as “Reconstructionists” because of their desire to remake the social order, went further. In the 1920s, Reconstructionists like Counts and Harold Ordway Rugg argued that high schools should be incubators of the social regimes of the future. Teachers would instruct students to “discard dispositions and maxims” derived from America’s “individualistic” ethos, wrote Counts. A professor in Columbia’s Teachers College and president of the American Federation of Teachers, Counts was for a time enamored of Joseph Stalin. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1929, he published A Ford Crosses Soviet Russia, a panegyric on the Bolsheviks’ “new society.” Counts believed that in the future, “all important forms of capital” would “have to be collectively owned,” and in his 1932 essay “Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?,” he argued that teachers should enlist students in the work of “social regeneration.”
Like Counts, Rugg, a Teachers College professor and cofounder of the National Council for the Social Studies, believed that the American economy was flawed because it was “utterly undesigned and uncontrolled.” In his 1933 book The Great Technology, he called for the “social reconstruction” and “scientific design” of the economy, arguing that it was “now axiomatic that the production and distribution of goods can no longer be left to the vagaries of chance–specifically to the unbridled competitions of self-aggrandizing human nature.” There “must be central control and supervision of the entire [economic] plant” by “trained and experienced technical personnel.” At the same time, he argued, the new social order must “socialize the vast proportion” of wealth and outlaw the activities of “middlemen” who didn’t contribute to the “production of true value.”
Rugg proposed “new materials of instruction” that “shall illustrate fearlessly and dramatically the inevitable consequence of the lack of planning and of central control over the production and distribution of physical things. . . . We shall disseminate a new conception of government–one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interest of all people; and one that will successfully adjust the psychological problems among men.”
Rugg himself set to work composing the “new materials of instruction.” In An Introduction to Problems of American Culture, his 1931 social studies textbook for junior high school students, Rugg deplored the “lack of planning in American life”:
“Repeatedly throughout this book we have noted the unplanned character of our civilization. In every branch of agriculture, industry, and business this lack of planning reveals itself. For instance, manufacturers in the United States produce billions’ of dollars worth of goods without scientific planning. Each one produces as much as he thinks he can sell, and then each one tries to sell more than his competitors. . . . As a result, hundreds of thousands of owners of land, mines, railroads, and other means of transportation and communication, stores, and businesses of one kind or another, compete with one another without any regard for the total needs of all the people. . . . This lack of national planning has indeed brought about an enormous waste in every outstanding branch of industry. . . . Hence the whole must be planned.
Rugg pointed to Soviet Russia as an example of the comprehensive control that America needed, and he praised Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, which resulted in millions of deaths from famine and forced labor. The “amount of coal to be mined each year in the various regions of Russia,”
Rugg told the junior high schoolers reading his textbook,
“is to be planned. So is the amount of oil to be drilled, the amount of wheat, corn, oats, and other farm products to be raised. The number and size of new factories, power stations, railroads, telegraph and telephone lines, and radio stations to be constructed are planned. So are the number and kind of schools, colleges, social centers, and public buildings to be erected. In fact, every aspect of the economic, social, and political life of a country of 140,000,000 people is being carefully planned! . . . The basis of a secure and comfortable living for the American people lies in a carefully planned economic life.”
During the 1930s, tens of thousands of American students used Rugg’s social studies textbooks.
Toward the end of the decade, school districts began to drop Rugg’s textbooks because of their socialist bias. In 1942, Columbia historian Allan Nevins further undermined social studies’ premises when he argued in The New York Times Magazine that American high schools were failing to give students a “thorough, accurate, and intelligent knowledge of our national past–in so many ways the brightest national record in all world history.” Nevins’s was the first of many critiques that would counteract the collectivist bias of social studies in American high schools, where “old-fashioned” history classes have long been the cornerstone of the social studies curriculum.
Yet possibly because school boards, so vigilant in their superintendence of the high school, were not sure what should be done with younger children, social studies gained a foothold in the primary school such as it never obtained in the secondary school. The chief architect of elementary school social studies was Paul Hanna, who entered Teachers College in 1924 and fell under the spell of Counts and Rugg. “We cannot expect economic security so long as the [economic] machine is conceived as an instrument for the production of profits for private capital rather than as a tool functioning to release mankind from the drudgery of work,” Hanna wrote in 1933.
Hanna was no less determined than Rugg to reform the country through education. “Pupils must be indoctrinated with a determination to make the machine work for society,” he wrote. His methods, however, were subtler than Rugg’s. Unlike Rugg’s textbooks, Hanna’s did not explicitly endorse collectivist ideals. The Hanna books contain no paeans to central planning or a command economy. On the contrary, the illustrations have the naive innocence of the watercolors in Scott Foresman’s Dick and Jane readers. The books depict an idyllic but familiar America, rich in material goods and comfortably middle-class; the fathers and grandfathers wear suits and ties and white handkerchiefs in their breast pockets.
Not only the pictures but the lessons in the books are deceptively innocuous. It is in the back of the books, in the notes and “interpretive outlines,” that Hanna smuggles in his social agenda by instructing teachers how each lesson is to be interpreted so that children learn “desirable patterns of acting and reacting in democratic group living.” A lesson in the second-grade text Susan’s Neighbors at Work, for example, which describes the work of police officers, firefighters, and other public servants, is intended to teach “concerted action” and “cooperation in obeying commands and well-thought-out plans which are for the general welfare.” A lesson in Tom and Susan, a first-grade text, about a ride in grandfather’s red car is meant to teach children to move “from absorption in self toward consideration of what is best in a group situation.” Lessons in Peter’s Family, another first-grade text, seek to inculcate the idea of “socially desirable” work and “cooperative labor.”
Hanna’s efforts to promote “behavior traits” conducive to “group living” would be less objectionable if he balanced them with lessons that acknowledge the importance of ideals and qualities of character that don’t flow from the group–individual exertion, liberty of action, the necessity at times of resisting the will of others. It is precisely Coleridge’s principle of individual “self-development” that is lost in Hanna’s preoccupation with social development. In the Hanna books, the individual is perpetually sunk in the impersonality of the tribe; he is a being defined solely by his group obligations. The result is distorting; the Hanna books fail to show that the prosperous America they depict, if it owes something to the impulse to serve the community, owes as much, or more, to the free striving of individuals pursuing their own ends.
Hanna’s spirit is alive and well in the American elementary school. Not only Scott Foresman but other big scholastic publishers–among them Macmillan/McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt–publish textbooks that dwell continually on the communal group and on the activities that people undertake for its greater good. Lessons from Scott Foresman’s second-grade textbook Social Studies: People and Places (2003) include “Living in a Neighborhood,” “We Belong to Groups,” “A Walk Through a Community,” “How a Community Changes,” “Comparing Communities,” “Services in Our Community,” “Our Country Is Part of Our World,” and “Working Together.” The book’s scarcely distinguishable twin, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill’s We Live Together (2003), is suffused with the same group spirit. Macmillan/McGraw-Hill’s textbook for third-graders, Our Communities (2003), is no less faithful to the Hanna model. The third-grade textbooks of Scott Foresman and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (both titled Communities) are organized on similar lines, while the fourth-grade textbooks concentrate on regional communities. Only in the fifth grade is the mold shattered, as students begin the sequential study of American history; they are by this time in sight of high school, where history has long been paramount.

Today’s social studies textbooks will not turn children into little Maoists. The group happy-speak in which they are composed is more fatuous than polemical; Hanna’s Reconstructionist ideals have been so watered down as to be little more than banalities. The “ultimate goal of the social studies,” according to Michael Berson, a coauthor of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt series, is to “instigate a response that spreads compassion, understanding, and hope throughout our nation and the global community.” Berson’s textbooks, like those of the other publishers, are generally faithful to this flabby, attenuated Comtism.
Yet feeble though the books are, they are not harmless. Not only do they do too little to acquaint children with their culture’s ideals of individual liberty and initiative; they promote the socialization of the child at the expense of the development of his own individual powers. The contrast between the old and new approaches is nowhere more evident than in the use that each makes of language. The old learning used language both to initiate the child into his culture and to develop his mind. Language and culture are so intimately related that the Greeks, who invented Western primary education, used the same word to designate both: paideia signifies both culture and letters (literature). The child exposed to a particular language gains insight into the culture that the language evolved to describe–for far from being an artifact of speech only, language is the master light of a people’s thought, character, and manners. At the same time, language–particularly the classic and canonical utterances of a people, its primal poetry–[and its History?] has a unique ability to awaken a child’s powers, in part because such utterances, Plato says, sink “furthest into the depths of the soul.”
Social studies, because it is designed not to waken but to suppress individuality, shuns all but the most rudimentary and uninspiring language. Social studies textbooks descend constantly to the vacuity of passages like this one, from People and Places:
“Children all around the world are busy doing the same things. They love to play games and enjoy going to school. They wish for peace. They think that adults should take good care of the Earth. How else do you think these children are like each other? How else do you think they are like you?”
The language of social studies is always at the same dead level of inanity. There is no shadow or mystery, no variation in intensity or alteration of pitch–no romance, no refinement, no awe or wonder. A social studies textbook is a desert of linguistic sterility supporting a meager scrub growth of commonplaces about “community,” “neighborhood,” “change,” and “getting involved.” Take the arid prose in Our Communities:
“San Antonio, Texas, is a large community. It is home to more than one million people, and it is still growing. People in San Antonio care about their community and want to make it better. To make room for new roads and houses, many old trees must be cut down. People in different neighborhoods get together to fix this by planting.”
It might be argued that a richer and more subtle language would be beyond third-graders. Yet in his Third Eclectic Reader, William Holmes McGuffey, a nineteenth-century educator, had eight-year-olds reading Wordsworth and Whittier. His nine-year-olds read the prose of Addison, Dr. Johnson, and Hawthorne and the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Southey, and Bryant. His ten-year-olds studied the prose of Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Sterne, Hazlitt, and Macaulay [History] and the poetry of Pope, Longfellow, Shakespeare, and Milton.
McGuffey adapted to American conditions some of the educational techniques that were first developed by the Greeks. In fifth-century BC Athens, the language of Homer and a handful of other poets formed the core of primary education. With the emergence of Rome, Latin became the principal language of Western culture and for centuries lay at the heart of primary- and grammar-school education. McGuffey had himself received a classical education, but conscious that nineteenth-century America was a post-Latin culture, he revised the content of the old learning even as he preserved its underlying technique of using language as an instrument of cultural initiation and individual self-development. He incorporated, in his Readers, not canonical Latin texts but classic specimens of English prose and poetry [and History].
Because the words of the Readers bit deep–deeper than the words in today’s social studies textbooks do–they awakened individual potential. The writer Hamlin Garland acknowledged his “deep obligation” to McGuffey “for the dignity and literary grace of his selections. From the pages of his readers I learned to know and love the poems of Scott, Byron, Southey, and Words- worth and a long line of the English masters. I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selected scenes which I read in these books.” Not all, but some children will come away from a course in the old learning stirred to the depths by the language of Blake or Emerson. But no student can feel, after making his way through the groupthink wastelands of a social studies textbook, that he has traveled with Keats in the realms of gold.
It might be objected that primers like the McGuffey Readers were primarily intended to instruct children in reading and writing, something that social studies doesn’t pretend to do. In fact, the Readers, like other primers of the time, were only incidentally language manuals. Their foremost function was cultural: they used language both to introduce children to their cultural heritage [including their History] and to stimulate their individual self-culture. The acultural, group biases of social studies might be pardonable if cultural learning continued to have a place in primary-school English instruction. But primary-school English–or “language arts,” as it has come to be called–no longer introduces children, as it once did, to the canonical language of their culture; it is not uncommon for public school students today to reach the fifth grade without having encountered a single line of classic English prose or poetry. Language arts has become yet another vehicle for the socialization of children. A recent article by educators Karen Wood and Linda Bell Soares in The Reading Teacher distills the essence of contemporary language-arts instruction, arguing that teachers should cultivate not literacy in the classic sense but “critical literacy,” a “pedagogic approach to reading that focuses on the political, sociocultural, and economic forces that shape young students’ lives.”
For educators devoted to the social studies model, the old learning is anathema precisely because it liberates individual potential. It releases the “powers of a young soul,” the classicist educator Werner Jaeger wrote, “breaking down the restraints which hampered it, and leading into a glad activity.” The social educators have revised the classic ideal of education expressed by Pindar: “Become what you are” has given way to “Become what the group would have you be.” Social studies’ verbal drabness is the means by which its contrivers starve the self of the sustenance that nourishes individual growth. A stunted soul can more easily be reduced to an acquiescent dullness than a vital, growing one can; there is no readier way to reduce a people to servile imbecility than to cut them off from the traditions of their language [and their History], as the Party does in George Orwell’s 1984.
Indeed, today’s social studies theorists draw on the same social philosophy that Orwell feared would lead to Newspeak. The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities, a 2006 collection of articles by leading social studies educators, is a socialist smorgasbord of essays on topics like “Marxism and Critical Multicultural Social Studies” and “Decolonizing the Mind for World-Centered Global Education.” The book, too, reveals the pervasive influence of Marxist thinkers like Peter McLaren, a professor of urban schooling at UCLA who advocates “a genuine socialist democracy without market relations,” venerates Che Guevara as a “secular saint,” and regards the individual “self” as a delusion, an artifact of the material “relations which produced it”–“capitalist production, masculinist economies of power and privilege, Eurocentric signifiers of self/other identifications,” all the paraphernalia of bourgeois imposture. For such apostles of the social pack, Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Milton’s and Tennyson’s “soul within,” Spenser’s “my self, my inward self I mean,” and Wordsworth’s aspiration to be “worthy of myself” are expressions of naive faith in a thing that dialectical materialism has revealed to be an accident of matter, a random accumulation of dust and clay.
The test of an educational practice is its power to enable a human being to realize his own promise in a constructive way. Social studies fails this test. Purge it of the social idealism that created and still inspires it, and what remains is an insipid approach to the cultivation of the mind, one that famishes the soul even as it contributes to what Pope called the “progress of dulness.” It should be abolished.

Scott Jaschik:

Complaints about doctoral education in the humanities — it takes too long, it’s not leading to jobs, it’s disjointed — are rampant. So too are periodic calls for radical reform.
But Stanford University is encouraging its humanities departments to redesign humanities doctoral programs so that students could finish in five years (down from the current average of seven at the university and much longer elsewhere), and so that the programs prepare students for careers in and out of academe. While the university is not forcing departments to change, it last week gave all humanities departments a request for proposals that offered a trade: departments that give concrete plans to cut time to degree and change the curriculum will be eligible for extra support — in particular for year-round support for doctoral students (who currently aren’t assured of summer support throughout their time as grad students). The plans would need to be measurable, and the support would disappear if plans aren’t executed.
While some Stanford faculty members in the humanities have been speaking out about the need to reform humanities programs for some time, and while a few universities elsewhere have experimented with one or two programs, the Stanford initiative could shape up to be the broadest yet to encourage substantial change in humanities Ph.D. education.

Jack Stripling:

While this statement is surely sometimes true, it is also true that some of the nation’s top-paid presidents continue to receive perks that their corporate counterparts have relinquished under shareholder criticism.
Among the 50 highest-paid private-college presidents in 2010, half led institutions that provided top executives with cash to cover taxes on bonuses and other benefits, a Chronicle analysis has found. This practice, known as “grossing up,” has fallen out of fashion at many publicly traded companies, where boards have decided the perk is simply not worth the shareholder outrage it can invite.
“Those arrangements became radioactive over the last 10 years,” said Mark A. Borges, an expert on executive pay and a principal at Compensia, a consulting company.
Regardless of the amount of money involved, people typically recoil when they learn that an organization’s wealthiest employees are given help covering taxes, Mr. Borges said. In the throes of a national debate about tax fairness, those kinds of payments reinforce the perception that the well-off play by a different set of rules. They also point toward the significant bargaining power that presidents have in contract negotiations.
“The whole issue of paying people’s taxes on their behalf grates on people,” Mr. Borges said.

Jarrett Skorup:

When continually focusing in the media on being “forced” to represent people who don’t pay dues under a right-to-work law, union heads are implying that they spend the vast majority of their money on contract negotiations, representation or other non-political work. That is a myth.
For example, according to the most recent federal filings, the Michigan Education Association — the state’s largest labor union — received $122 million and spent $134 million in 2012. They averaged about $800 from each of their 152,000 members.
According to union documents, “representational activities” (money spent on bargaining contracts for members) made up only 11 percent of total spending for the union. Meanwhile, spending on “general overhead” (union administration and employee benefits) comprised of 61 percent of the total spending.
So MEA members who disagree with the leadership of the union are paying up to 90 percent of their dues, but the union is only spending about a tenth of the dues money representing them.

Grant Wiggins:

GRANT: So, Steve, talk to me about the interesting part of math, the creative side. So many kids think math is just drudgery plug-and-chug work. What does it mean to be creative as a mathematician?
STEVE: Well, there’s a question part and an answer part to what we do. The 1st part is to find good questions. The 2nd part is to turn well-formed questions into answers. Both demand some creativity, but it’s the questioning part that needs more emphasis in schools.
How do I know what to investigate or think about? Most people would be puzzled – “Isn’t math already done? Don’t we know all the numbers? Are you trying to think of bigger and bigger numbers or new kinds of shapes?” Well, no. There are all sorts of interesting theoretical and applied problems out there.

Jason Riley:

“For Young Latino Readers, an Image Is Missing.”
So goes the headline of a recent New York Times story that cites a lot of multiculturalist mumbo-jumbo to explain the learning gap between white and Hispanic students.
“Hispanic students now make up nearly a quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment,” notes the Times, “yet nonwhite Latino children seldom see themselves in books written for young readers.” The paper would have us believe that this contributes to the underperformance of Latinos on standardized tests. According to Department of Education data for 2011, 18% of Hispanic fourth graders were proficient in reading, compared with 44% of white fourth graders.
“Education experts and teachers who work with large Latino populations say that a lack of familiar images could be an obstacle as young readers work to build stamina and deepen their understanding of story elements like character motivation,” says the article.

The Global Report Card, via a kind reader’s email:

Ever wonder how your public school district stacks up when compared to the rest of the world? What about how your district compares to your state or even the nation?

Tap or click on the images to view larger versions. Learn more about Madison & Wisconsin versus the world at www.wisconsin2.org.
How Does Your Child’s School Rank Against the Rest of the World?

If your kids are in a good American public school, chances are you know it. (In fact, it’s probably the reason you traded in that urban loft for the property taxes of the suburbs.) But what if you woke up one morning and found that a Wizard of Oz-style tornado had dropped your entire district down in the middle of Singapore or Finland? How would your children’s test scores measure up then?
That’s more or less what the Bush Institute wants to you to imagine as you click through its Global Report Card, an interactive graphic that lets you rank your district against 25 other countries. “When you tell people there are problems in education, elites will usually think, ‘Ah, that refers to those poor kids in big cities. It doesn’t have anything to do with me,'” says Jay P. Greene, head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas and one of the lead researchers behind the Global Report Card. “The power of denial is so great that people don’t think a finding really has anything to do with them unless you actually name their town.”

Sir Ken Robinson:

There are two main themes in the talk. First, we’re all born with deep natural capacities for creativity and systems of mass education tend to suppress them. Second, it is increasingly urgent to cultivate these capacities — for personal, economic and cultural reasons — and to rethink the dominant approaches to education to make sure that we do. One reason the talk has traveled so far is that these themes resonate so deeply with people at a personal level. I hear constantly from people around the world who feel marginalized by their own education, who want to thank me for helping them to understand why that may be and that they’re not alone. In the talk, I mentioned a book I was writing about the need to find our true talents and how often people are pushed away from them. The responses I get show that this is a common experience that’s deeply felt and ultimately resented. (Incidentally, I said in the talk that the book is called Epiphany. I later changed the title to The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. It was too late to change the reference in the talk, which has since done wonders to promote sales of books called Epiphany… )
A second reason for the impact of the talk is that people and organizations everywhere can see that current systems of education are failing to meet the challenges we now all face and they’re working furiously to create alternatives. In many countries, they’re doing this in the face of national policies and cultural attitudes that seem locked in past. The dominant systems of education are based on three principles — or assumptions at least — that are exactly opposite to how human lives are actually lived. Apart from that, they’re fine. First, they promote standardization and a narrow view of intelligence when human talents are diverse and personal. Second, they promote compliance when cultural progress and achievement depend on the cultivation of imagination and creativity. Third, they are linear and rigid when the course of each human life, including yours, is organic and largely unpredictable. As the rate of change continues to accelerate, building new forms of education on these alternative principles is not a romantic whimsy: it’s essential to personal fulfillment and to the sustainability of the world we are now creating.

m

Howard Wainer:

What constitutes a dangerous equation? There are two obvious inter­ pretations: some equations are dangerous if you know the equation and others are dangerous if you do not. In this chapter I will not ex- plore the dangers an equation might hold because the secrets within
its bounds open doors behind which lie terrible peril. Few would dis- agree that the obvious winner in this contest would be Einstein’s iconic equation
E=MC2 (1.1)

Timothy Lee:

Many universities pay hefty subscription fees to provide their users unlimited access to archives like JSTOR. Most non-academics pay by the article. Swartz, who was a fellow at Harvard University in the fall of 2010, was apparently unhappy about this situation and so joined neighboring MIT’s WiFi network as a guest and began rapidly downloading JSTOR documents. He reportedly got 4.8 million of them.
When JSTOR blocked his IP address, Swartz allegedly connected with a different IP address. When MIT then cut off his laptop from the network, Swartz allegedly changed his MAC address to allow him to regain access. Eventually, the government says that Swartz entered an MIT networking closet and plugged his laptop directly into the campus network.
The updated indictment describes the scene when Swartz returned to the closet a few days later to pick up his laptop: “Swartz held his bicycle helmet like a mask to shield his face, looking through ventilation holes in the helmet. Swartz then removed his computer equipment from the closet, put it in his backpack, and left, again masking his face with the bicycle helmet before peering through a crack in the double doors and cautiously stepping out.”
Certainly there’s no excuse for breaking into a private network closet and installing equipment without permission. But the government seems to have lost all sense of proportion here. And the apparent legal theory behind the government’s case–that using a website in a manner that violates its terms of use constitutes felony computer hacking–could have serious unintended consequences.

Austin Hughes:

The temptation to overreach, however, seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science. Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth. And this attitude is becoming more widespread among scientists themselves. All too many of my contemporaries in science have accepted without question the hype that suggests that an advanced degree in some area of natural science confers the ability to pontificate wisely on any and all subjects.
Of course, from the very beginning of the modern scientific enterprise, there have been scientists and philosophers who have been so impressed with the ability of the natural sciences to advance knowledge that they have asserted that these sciences are the only valid way of seeking knowledge in any field. A forthright expression of this viewpoint has been made by the chemist Peter Atkins, who in his 1995 essay “Science as Truth” asserts the “universal competence” of science. This position has been called scientism — a term that was originally intended to be pejorative but has been claimed as a badge of honor by some of its most vocal proponents. In their 2007 book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, for example, philosophers James Ladyman, Don Ross, and David Spurrett go so far as to entitle a chapter “In Defense of Scientism.”
Modern science is often described as having emerged from philosophy; many of the early modern scientists were engaged in what they called “natural philosophy.” Later, philosophy came to be seen as an activity distinct from but integral to natural science, with each addressing separate but complementary questions — supporting, correcting, and supplying knowledge to one another. But the status of philosophy has fallen quite a bit in recent times. Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy. Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering such questions, but the only means of answering them. For most of those who dabble in scientism, this shift is unacknowledged, and may not even be recognized. But for others, it is explicit. Atkins, for example, is scathing in his dismissal of the entire field: “I consider it to be a defensible proposition that no philosopher has helped to elucidate nature; philosophy is but the refinement of hindrance.”

School Matters Milwaukee:

The Grammy Foundation has awarded Milwaukee Public Schools’ Milwaukee High School of the Arts a Grammy Signature Schools Community Award.
Milwaukee High School of the Arts is the first school in the Midwest to receive this designation. It was selected in part because of its students’ past involvement in All Star Grammy Jazz Ensembles, including last school year’s participant, Felix Ramsey.

Michele Molnar:

The U.S. has a shortage of demanding parents.
So says Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, speaking today in Washington, D.C. at the release of the NAACP’s blueprint for education reform called, “Finding Our Way Back to First: Reclaiming World Leadership by Educating All America’s Children.”
“One of the countries out-educating us by every measure is South Korea,” Duncan said, explaining that when President Barack Obama meets the President of South Korea, Obama routinely asks, “What’s your biggest educational challenge?”
The answer from Lee Myung-bak is this: “My parents are too demanding. Even my poorest parents demand a world class education,” according to Duncan.

Seth Godin.

Pat Schneider:

But divisions over strategy, wrapped in ideology, loom as large as ever. The mere mention that the education forum and summit were on tap drew online comments about the connection of school reformers to the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that generates model legislation for conservative causes.
Conspiracy theorists, opponents retorted.
Democratic state Rep. Brett Hulsey walked out early from the fundraising luncheon because he didn’t like what Canada and Legend were saying about the possibility of reform hinging on the ability to fire ineffective teachers.
Thomas J. Mertz, a parent and college instructor who blogs on education issues, expressed in a phone interview Friday his indignation over “flying in outside agitators who have spent no time in our schools and telling us what our problems are.”
Mertz said he also was concerned by the involvement of the Madison School District with events delivering anti-union, anti-public education, pro-charter school messages. The school district, for its part, took pains to say that the $5,000 it donated in staff time was for a Friday workshop session and that it had no involvement with the appearances by Canada and Legend.
Madison doesn’t need a summit to whip up excitement over the achievement gap issue, Mertz said when I asked if the Urban League events didn’t at least accomplish that. “It’s at the point where there’s more heat than light,” he said. “There’s all this agitation, but the work is being neglected.”
That’s a charge that School Board President James Howard, who says that the district might decide to mimic some of the practices presented at the summit, flatly denies. “We’re moving full speed ahead,” he said.
….
Caire told me that the school district and teachers union aren’t ready to give up their control over the school system. “The teachers union should be the entity that embraces change. The resources they get from the public should be used for the children’s advantage. What we’re saying is, ‘Be flexible, look at that contract and see how you can do what works.'”
Madison Teachers Inc. head John Matthews responded in an email to me that MTI contracts often include proposals aimed at improving education, in the best interests of students. “What Mr. Caire apparently objects to is that the contract provides those whom MTI represents due process and social justice, workplace justice that all employees deserve.”
If Caire has his way, Madison — and the state — are up for another round of debate over how radically to change education infrastructure to boost achievement of students of color.

More here and here.

Jerry Sun:

Since elementary school, we learned basic mathematics skills as little children. As we grew older, our math improved as we learned new concepts. Yet have people ever wondered why Americans lag behind Eastern Asian countries, such as China, in math? The answer might not easily be what you think:
The answer lies not only in the practice that Asian students receive but also, surprisingly, in the language we speak. Examine the following numbers: 8,2,4,6,7,5,1. Now look away for twenty seconds, and try to memorize the order of the numbers presented. Research has shown that you have a 50% chance of accurately memorizing that sequence perfectly, if you speak English.
Yet for those who speak Chinese, it is almost assured that you will get that sequence right. The reason is not due to intelligence, but actually the phonetics of our languages. Our brain is programmed to store numbers in a repetitive loop that lasts for only a short period of time. Chinese speakers are able to fit those 7 numbers into that span of time, while English speakers cannot. Hence, the Chinese speakers can memorize those numbers at a much more efficient rate than English speakers. How is this important?

Alan Borsuk:

Means, the superintendent of Mequon-Thiensville schools and the most prominent African-American involved in education in Milwaukee suburban schools, is pushing to have constructive conversations about a subject few have wanted to discuss publicly: the lower achievement overall of minority children in suburban schools, at a time when the number of minority children in those schools is rising.
Means’ presentation came on a recent evening before 35 people at Wauwatosa West High School, a session hosted by Wauwatosa and West Allis-West Milwaukee school officials.
A few weeks earlier, Means made a similar presentation at Whitefish Bay High School. He has made the same pitch in the district where he works and just about anywhere else people will listen to him.
He is spearheading the launch of a collaborative effort involving at least a half-dozen suburban districts aimed at taking new runs at improving the picture.
The gaps are widespread and persistent. Black kids and Hispanic kids do not do as well in school as their white peers, even in the schools with the highest incomes, best facilities, most stable teaching staffs and highest test scores.
But Means told the Wauwatosa audience that schools shouldn’t focus on societal factors they can’t control. There are things schools can do, he said, such as making more meaningful commitments to high expectations for all students, insisting on rigor in classrooms, and ensuring that culturally responsive teaching styles and relationship-building are prevalent.
Means advocated three broad routes for schools:

Mequon-Thiensville’s 2012-2013 budget is $51,286,130 or $14,024 for 3,657 students. Madison will spend $15,132 per student during the 2012-2013 school year.

Stephanie Banchero:

WASHINGTON–At Davis Elementary in this city’s mostly poor southeast section, 178 students are spread out in a 69-year-old building meant to hold 450.
Three miles away, the new, $30 million KIPP charter school teems with 1,050 children. Toddlers crawl over a state-of-the-art jungle gym and older students fill brightly decorated classrooms. A waiting list holds 2,000 names.
Many students who live within the Davis boundaries instead attend the charter school, one of 125 nationwide run by KIPP, a nonprofit. The exodus helped land Davis on a list of 20 schools targeted for closure next school year.

Peretz Partensky:

Back in the USSR in the 1980s, my schoolteacher warned me that if I didn’t study hard, I’d get drafted into the army and sent to die in Afghanistan. I studied hard. I moved to America. Twenty years later, I found myself in Afghanistan anyway.
After finishing my PhD in Biophysics, I realized that I didn’t envy my professors’ jobs. Instead of continuing on in academia, I shipped out to Jalalabad in December 2010 to join the Synergy Strike Force.
The SSF was assembled by a neuroscientist named Dave Warner, who has spent the past decade trying to apply science and communications to the problems of poverty and isolation, particularly in war-torn regions. The primary goal of the group in Jalalabad was to blanket the city with internet, to teach residents how to keep the internet functioning. The group was technically unaffiliated with the US government, but Dave had many contacts in the military, particularly at DARPA, and they knew we were there.

Brandon Fastman:

With his first book, Whatever It Takes, Paul Tough put educational reformer Geoffrey Canada on the map. Canada’s data-driven, cradle-to-career concept focuses not just on schools but on entire neighborhoods, leveraging all the resources necessary to fight the deleterious effects of poverty on children. His Harlem Children’s Zone has provided the model for Santa Barbara County’s THRIVE initiative. And when Santa Barbara Unified Assistant Superintendent Emilio Handall read, Whatever It Takes, he learned about a highly successful parent training program founded in San Antonio, Texas, called AVANCE. Before he knew it, a delegation of Santa Barbarans were in Texas learning about the AVANCE curriculum which is now offered at schools like Harding, McKinley, the Carpinteria’s Children’s Project at Main, and Isla Vista Elementary School.

Mario Koran:

But, Caire said, the biggest misperception about the achievement gap is that the same disparities exist across the county and that the problems are insurmountable.
“You guys, that’s just not true,” he said.
“People are doing this all over the country, proving it’s not the kids,” he added. “It’s the structure, and it is the adults that have to be changed. There’s some personal responsibility that has to be taken: we’re not going to allow the same thing that’s been going on to [keep] going on.”
Canada challenged school districts to rethink their approaches to education by engaging students; “to prove something can work, then scale that up.”
“We’re not saying privatize education, we’re saying let’s try some innovation, hold some people accountable, this is moderate stuff, but because the climate has been so resistant to change it sounds revolutionary,” he said.
Legend recognized that nationally, school districts face limited budgets but said countries with fewer resources are doing a better job of educating their students.

Anne Constable:

About one-third of teachers in the Santa Fe Public Schools were absent more than 10 days during the 2011-12 school year due to illness, bereavement or other personal reasons, according to a new analysis released Friday.
The report by Richard Bowman, chief accountability and strategy officer for the district, also showed that 33 percent of teachers were absent more than five days in the year for professional development, coaching or other school business.
The data show major differences among the schools. The percentage of teachers with more than 10 absences in the personal/sick category ranged from 12 percent at Salazar Elementary School to 53 percent at Atalaya Elementary School, for example.

From the report: From the Santa Fe Transition Report (3.6MB PDF):

mplement an electronic timekeeping program that will track employee attendance, tardiness, and overtime worked. The system should require intervention (in form of conference with deficient employees) after a set number of tardiness or absence infractions. The system should have several reporting capabilities for management to measure and detect trends, balances, and peak periods for comparisons and strategy planning. The system should automate payroll processes to better use, expend, save, and manage taxpayers’ funds.

More, here (PDF).

Nick Kristof:

THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.
Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.
“The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky. “It’s heartbreaking.”
This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.

Superintendent Jane Belmore (700K PDF):

For the 2012-13 school year, MMSD has 1041 leavers and 281 enterers for a net enrollment decrease of 760 students due to open enrollment.
Of the 1041 leavers for 2012-13, 663 were “continuing leavers” who open enrolled outside of the District in previous years. The other 378 leavers left MMSD for the first time this year.
The increasing number of total leavers in recent years results from many consecutive years of increases in first-time leavers who subsequently become continuing leavers.
First time leavers increased from 333 to 378 from 2011-12 to 2012-13.
About 40% of the MMSD residents who open enroll outside of the district for the first time never attended MMSD and could be considered “stayers” for other districts.
A 2009 survey of open enrollment leavers showed that personal preference led to about one third of the decisions to leave, including concerns about safety, drugs and negative peer pressure. Proximity to other districts’ schools accounts for about a quarter of the reasons for attending another district. About a quarter were related to curricular, after school or virtual programs.

Related: Much more on “open enrollment”, here, and the Madison School District’s enrollment forecast (PDF).

Tom Fowler & Dougles Belkin:

As a professor, James C. Wetherbe recognized the advantages that tenure provided. In his other roles as a board member and business consultant, though, he sensed that it sometimes undercut the credibility of his advice to clients and companies.
“I would get wisecracks…that it was easy for me to make some statements because I had a guaranteed job,” Mr. Wetherbe said. “So I decided to resign tenure.”
James C. Wetherbe, shown this week at Texas Tech in Lubbock, says he believes tenure can allow ineffective teachers to remain at schools.
Now Mr. Wetherbe claims in a federal lawsuit that his views on tenure have spurred officials at Texas Tech University, the Lubbock school he joined in 2000, to oppose his advancement, including to business-school dean. He calls it an ironic twist to the argument that tenure helps ensure academic freedom.
Mr. Wetherbe, an information-technology expert who formerly served on Best Buy Co.’s BBY -1.64% board of directors, maintains in the lawsuit filed this past week that Texas Tech has violated his First Amendment rights by penalizing him for his views on tenure when considering him for promotions.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity enewsletter via a kind Linda Doeseckle email (PDF):

When a union member files a grievance it means that the member and his or her union believe the employer has failed to live up to its end of the Collective Bargaining Agreement. They are called “agreements” for a reason: the union and the employer have agreed that what has been agreed upon in negotiations is what both parties will live by, that it is best for the employee and the employer. A Collective Bargaining Agreement is a legally binding Contract.
Filing a grievance sets in motion a process for resolving the employee’s complaint. Once a grievance is filed, the union and the employer meet in a process set forth in the Collective Bargaining Agreement to discuss the reasons it was filed. When the issue cannot be resolved through discussions, the union may take the complaint to a neutral third party (an arbitrator) who will decide whether the Contract has been violated. Wisconsin law assures that union- represented employees cannot be retaliated against because of filing a grievance.
The Collective Bargaining Agreement is the Constitution of the workplace, and only unionized employees, like members of MTI, are protected by a Collective Bargaining Agreement.

Stephanie Banchero:

U.S. students knew only about half of what they were expected to on a new vocabulary section of a national exam, in the latest evidence of severe shortcomings in the nation’s reading education.
Eighth-graders scored an average of 265 out of 500 in vocabulary on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the results of which were made public Thursday. Fourth-graders averaged a score of 218 out of 500.
The results showed that nearly half of eighth-graders didn’t know that “permeates” means to “spread all the way through,” and about the same proportion of fourth-graders didn’t know that “puzzled” means confused–words that educators think students in those grades should recognize.
Most fourth-graders did know the meaning of “created,” “spread” and “underestimate.” At eighth grade, most students knew “grimace,” “icons” and “edible.”

2011 NAEP reading results by state can be found here.

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

States today have sharply divergent views of what stakes, if any, to attach to test results for kids. Several have test-based 3rd-grade reading “gates” that you must pass to advance to 4th grade (Jeb Bush said the other day that “Seven states have started on this journey”). A few have “kindergarten-readiness” assessments (though those are more often teacher “checklists” than tests). And the last time I checked, about half the states have statewide exit tests that are prerequisite to graduating from high school, though it’s true that most peg such exams to what are today deemed 9th- or 10th-grade standards. (Under Common Core, I’d wager, a bunch of current state exit tests would correlate more with 7th- or 8th-grade standards!)
Some states also have end-of-course exams in high school, the passing of which is related to getting a diploma, and there’s a widening belief in educator-land that this is a better course of action than a single statewide exit test.
But a lot of states do none of those things because they don’t really believe in high stakes for kids (or can’t get away with it politically, or are totally into “local control”), and they tend to trust teacher judgment when it comes to passing students from grade to grade or awarding the course credits that, when accumulated, yield a diploma.

Trevor McKendrick:

Why do many people end up in the same socioeconomic rung as their parents?
There’s at least two reasons I can think of.
First, it’s easier to do something when you’ve seen someone else do it.
People thought the human body could not run a mile in less than four minutes until Roger Bannister did it in 1954. Once he had shown it was possible, two months later two other runners did it in the same race.
It’s the same with being raised by parents who got rich. You saw what they did, you know it can be done.
On the other hand, if you don’t know anyone who has gone to college you might not know how that process works or even consider trying.
Being the first to do something is hard.

Stephanie Simon:

Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White has a problem with schools.
They’re too confining, he says. They trap kids in chairs, in classrooms, in the narrow bounds of an established curriculum. So White and a handful of fellow revolutionaries have begun pushing a new vision for American public education.
Call it the a la carte school.
The model, now in practice or under consideration in states including Louisiana, Michigan, Arizona and Utah, allows students to build a custom curriculum by selecting from hundreds of classes offered by public institutions and private vendors.
A teenager in Louisiana, for instance, might study algebra online with a private tutor, business in a local entrepreneur’s living room, literature at a community college and test prep with the national firm Princeton Review – with taxpayers picking up the tab for it all.

Wisconsin State Journal:

Good teachers are more important than good teachers unions.
That’s worth noting as the Wisconsin Education Association Council loses membership and explores a possible merger.
WEAC has been hurt by Act 10, Gov. Scott Walker’s strict limits on collective bargaining for most public workers. Act 10 means most teachers across Wisconsin are no longer required to pay dues to a union. The legislation also prompted many aging teachers to retire sooner than planned.
WEAC membership has fallen from nearly 100,000 two years ago to around 70,000, with further decline expected as contract extensions in cities such as Madison, Janesville and Milwaukee expire.

Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators.

Matthew DeFour:

Two national education reform advocates encouraged about 100 attendees at an Urban League luncheon Thursday to advocate for institutional changes in the school system or “watch your city disappear.”
Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City, and Grammy-award-winning R&B musician John Legend participated in an hour-long discussion moderated by local television journalist Neil Heinen.
Canada said Madison leaders need to allow more educational innovation, such as charter schools, if it wants to raise achievement for low-income and minority students.
“You’ve got the cancer, but no one’s allowed to do any research,” Canada said. “If you care about this city, you’re going to end this (achievement gap). There is no future in allowing large numbers of your citizens to fail.”
…..
State Rep. Brett Hulsey, D-Madison, left the luncheon early because he didn’t like what he was hearing from the presenters.
“What they’re saying, I don’t know what it had to do with making our schools better for our kids,” Hulsey said. “We need to invest in our schools to hire more teachers, not talk about firing more teachers.”

Much more on the rejected Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.

Erin Richards:

After losing previous rounds of federal Race to the Top grant competitions, Wisconsin won a slice of funding Thursday: a $22.7 million grant that will help expand and improve services for young children in day care centers, preschools and kindergarten classrooms.
Wisconsin joined four other states – Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico and Oregon – that will receive a share of the $133 million Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge grant, the U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday.
Wisconsin’s grant will be spent over four years on strengthening and expanding the YoungStar child care rating system and also accelerating work on a data system that would track kids in early childhood and target more disadvantaged children for services.
A main goal is to help close the “readiness” gap between children who are white and from middle- to upper-income families and those who are of color and/or from low-income households. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds often enter the K-12 system behind their more affluent peers in terms of social development and academic exposure.

Karen Herzog:

A slightly higher percentage of students from outside Wisconsin would be allowed to enroll at University of Wisconsin System campuses for the first time in more than 40 years, starting next fall, under a compromise expected to be approved Friday by the UW Board of Regents.
A regents committee Thursday unanimously approved the compromise, raising the nonresident enrollment cap by 2.5% – from the current 25% cap to 27.5% on a three-year rolling average.
UW-Madison had proposed a nonresident enrollment cap of 30% on a rolling three-year average to help manage its enrollment. But it quickly became clear that the 30% cap wasn’t going to fly.
UW-Madison is responding to complaints that too many bright Wisconsin kids can’t get admitted to the flagship. While raising the nonresident cap, the campus also is pledging to offer 200 more freshman seats to Wisconsin residents.

Mike Ford:

Jeff Ziegler is a “teacher leader” in the Madison Metropolitan School District who has never made any secret of his disdain for Gov. Scott Walker. Openly critical of the budget-repair bill that virtually eliminated collective bargaining, he didn’t just sign the recall petition against the governor. He circulated it and spoke up publicly at a school board meeting in his hometown of Marshall during the height of the protests in March 2011.
“I’d just like to say I do not support what the governor’s doing, with this motion to eliminate collective bargaining of public employees,” he was quoted as saying. “I am very disappointed in the WASB, the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, for initially coming out and supporting this and characterizing it as, I believe they said, it balanced the negotiations.
“I don’t see how you could characterize giving one side total control and the other side nothing and calling that balanced,” he said.
Both the protests and the recall, of course, fell short. And chances are the effort of the union to which he belongs, Madison Teachers Inc., to nullify the law in the courts will fail, too. But that doesn’t mean Ziegler, who said he was speaking only on behalf of himself that night, has no influence over how his local school board in Dane County — which he suggested has too much power — makes decisions.
Quite the opposite.

Sunny Schubert:

Forty years ago, Howard Fuller was an angry young man working as a community organizer for an anti-poverty program in North Carolina. He had an Afro, wore a dashiki, toyed with Marxism, and spoke disparagingly of racial integration.
He went by the name Owusu Sadaukai, which means “one who leads his people” in Kiswahili. He visited Africa and briefly took up arms with Communist-backed “freedom fighters” trying to overthrow the Portuguese colonial government of Mozambique. Back in the states, he founded a blacks-only university, as well as African Liberation Day, which for several years in the 1970s drew thousands of marchers in a variety of U.S. cities.
Today, Fuller, 71, lives in Milwaukee and is a nationally known leader in the education reform movement. And while once he was a darling of the left, today he’s a hero to conservatives for challenging the teachers unions and championing the school choice movement.
Dissertations and books have been written about Fuller’s remarkable life, and he was featured in the emotionally charged documentary about failing inner-city schools, “Waiting for Superman.” He’s been showered with enough awards to paper a wall, including four honorary doctorates.

Alisha Azevedo:

Students looking for massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, have many options, with a growing number of providers and course titles. A handful of Web sites have popped up over the past few months to help students find courses they’re interested in, much as a restaurant-goer might turn to Yelp. Some of the sites let students review the MOOC’s they’ve taken, incorporating their views into the sites’ overall guidance.
One new directory, Course Buffet, was started two months ago by Bruce Bolton, out of his frustration over trying to compare the quality of online resources. The site lists more than 500 courses from various MOOC providers, and each course is assigned a difficulty level (Psychology 100, for example), to help students move from easier to more difficult material. He hopes to turn a profit by selling advertising, such as by sending offers from certification companies to students.
Mr. Bolton plans to add an online-transcript feature to show a list of MOOC’s a user has completed, he said. “There’s no way to prove you have taken all those courses–we’ll have to work on that,” he said. “But it gives you something to show people.”

Motoko Rich:

Like many of his third-grade classmates, Mario Cortez-Pacheco likes reading the “Magic Tree House” series, about a brother and a sister who take adventurous trips back in time. He also loves the popular “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” graphic novels.
But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said.
Hispanic students now make up nearly a quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Hispanic Center, and are the fastest-growing segment of the school population. Yet nonwhite Latino children seldom see themselves in books written for young readers. (Dora the Explorer, who began as a cartoon character, is an outlier.)

Scott Jaschik:

A new study finds that, in political science, earning a Ph.D. from one of a relatively small number of universities is the key to landing a job at a research-intensive university. And the study suggests that the number of academic “superpowers” is so small that good candidates from less-favored institutions are likely being overlooked.
The study looked at the 116 universities ranked by U.S. News & World Report for political science graduate programs, and examined where all of the tenure-track or tenured faculty members earned their doctorates. The top four institutions in the magazine’s rankings of departments — Harvard, Princeton and Stanford Universities and the University of Michigan — were the Ph.D. alma maters of 616 of the political scientists at the 116 universities (roughly 20 percent of the total). The top 11 institutions were collectively responsible for the doctoral education of about half of those in tenured or tenure-track positions at the 116 universities, leaving more than 100 departments to “contest the remaining 50 percent of openings,” says the study.
The study is described in an article by Robert Oprisko, a visiting assistant professor of international studies at Butler University, in The Georgetown Public Policy Review.

The Economist:

THE old saying that where there’s muck, there’s brass has never proved more true than in genetics. Once, and not so long ago, received wisdom was that most of the human genome–perhaps as much as 99% of it–was “junk”. If this junk had a role, it was just to space out the remaining 1%, the genes in which instructions about how to make proteins are encoded, in a useful way in the cell nucleus.
That, it now seems, was about as far from the truth as it is possible to be. The decade or so since the completion of the Human Genome Project has shown that lots of the junk must indeed have a function. The culmination of that demonstration was the publication, in September, of the results of the ENCODE project. This suggested that almost two-thirds of human DNA, rather than just 1% of it, is being copied into molecules of RNA, the chemical that carries protein-making instructions to the sub-cellular factories which turn those proteins out, and that as a consequence, rather than there being just 23,000 genes (namely, the bits of DNA that encode proteins), there may be millions of them.

Tim Martin:

A coalition including education groups and others is working to organize opposition to a series of school reforms pushed by Gov. Rick Snyder and some Republicans in the Michigan Legislature.
The coalition – called Michigan for Quality Schools – said Monday the state should step back from the proposed changes and instead study and implement what it calls proven, successful education policies adopted by top-performing states.
Meanwhile, supporters of one of the Snyder-backed programs – the Education Achievement Authority – also appeared at the Capitol on Monday to speak in favor of the new district. The EAA – in its first year of operation and limited to 15 schools in Detroit – could be put into state law and expanded into other parts of the state through bills pending in the state Legislature.
The EAA issue could be voted on by the Legislature within the next couple of weeks. The key bills are House Bill 6004 and Senate Bill 1358. Other school choice and finance reforms likely won’t be taken up until 2013, but the pace of change is troubling much of the education community.

Nancy Marshall-Genzer

Kids may groan when their parents hire a tutor or drag them to music lessons. But some educators say that extra learning gives them a leg up on students who can’t afford after-school activities. So today, school and government officials, nonprofits and the Ford Foundation announced that almost 20,000 students will spend more time in school, starting next fall.
“The question we have is can we give all children the opportunity that our most affluent kids have,” said Luis Ubinas, president of the Ford Foundation.
To answer that question, the Ford Foundation and the National Center on Time and Learning have signed up dozens of public schools for a pilot program. They can opt for a longer school day or year.
Randi Weingarten heads the American Federation of Teachers union. She’s backing the program, albeit cautiously.

Outreach @ WIBA 18mb mp3 audio file

Derrell talks with Kaleem Caire current president of The Madison Urban League about an upcoming event to raise awareness in the graduation rate in the African American population.

Educate to Elevate is an education series that brings together local and national leaders to talk about their efforts, share lessons-learned and join us in rallying the Greater Madison community to support the education of our children and our schools.

Lyndsey Layton:

As states across the country implement broad changes in curriculum from kindergarten through high school, English teachers worry that they will have to replace the dog-eared novels they love with historical documents and nonfiction texts.
The Common Core State Standards in English, which have been adopted in 46 states and the District, call for public schools to ramp up nonfiction so that by 12th grade students will be reading mostly “informational text” instead of fictional literature. But as teachers excise poetry and classic works of fiction from their classrooms, those who designed the guidelines say it appears that educators have misunderstood them.
Proponents of the new standards, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, say U.S. students have suffered from a diet of easy reading and lack the ability to digest complex nonfiction, including studies, reports and primary documents. That has left too many students unprepared for the rigors of college and demands of the workplace, experts say.

Morgan Smith:

While skeptics say reporting requirements for state graduation rates contain too many loopholes, other education policy experts say Texas deserves credit for implementing innovative programs to keep students in school.
With witnesses in a school finance trial testifying daily on the challenges facing public education in the state, and with a chorus of state leaders citing the failings of traditional public schools in calling for reform, some may be surprised to hear that by one measure, Texas schools appear to be doing quite well.
Preliminary data released by the U.S. Department of Education this week shows that Texas — along with five other states — ranks fourth in the nation for its four-year high school graduation rates. With an overall rate of 86 percent in the 2010-11 school year, the state follows Iowa, with 88 percent, and Wisconsin and Vermont, both at 87 percent.
Though the statewide average has climbed steadily in the past five years, that has not always been the case. The last time the Texas Supreme Court ruled on the state’s school finance system, in 2005, it warned of a “severe dropout problem,” calling the lagging graduation rates of blacks and Hispanics “especially troublesome.”‘

Kelly Chen:

In an experiment aimed to raise achievement in America’s public schools, 11 school districts across five states — Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee — will be extending their class time learning by at least 300 hours, starting in 2013. The three-year pilot program, which will serve more than 20,000 students in 40 schools, hopes to improve under-performing schools and make students more competitive internationally.
By a standard school calendar, students attend six-and-a-half hour school days for 180 days a year. Of the 1,000 schools already participating in expanded-time schedules, students attend on average 7.8 hours of school a day, according to a report by the National Center on Time & Learning.
Under the pilot program, 11 school districts will add at least 300 more hours to the academic calendar by extending hours within a day or adding more days to the academic year.

Charlie Osborne:

Campaigners europe-v-facebook are planning legal action concerning Facebook in Ireland over the social network’s adherence to privacy and data protection.
The Austrian privacy campaign group said Tuesday that changes and concessions made by the social networking giant do not go far enough, even after a year of campaigns — and so plan to take on the Irish DPA.
Europe-v-facebook most notably won a petition to force Facebook to turn off its facial recognition feature in Europe. In addition, due to the campaigner’s complaints, Facebook now has to limit retention periods for certain data sets, and the firm must also disclose more information on how much data it holds for individual users.
However, after numerous complaints to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, privacy regulations are still “miles away from other European data protection authorities in its understanding of the law,” and “Facebook gave the authority the runaround,” the group said in a statement.
The group subsequently published a 70-page response (.pdf) to the Irish audit, dubbed a “counter report” which details all alleged violations of European law after a request from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. Max Schrems, speaker for europe-v-facebook, said that the report discovered the Irish authority has “not always delivered accurate and correct results,” and the group wonder if “blind trust” of the tech giant may have impeded the original audit.

Michael Horn:

My mission is to create a student-centric education system so that all children have an education that allows them to find their passions and fulfill their human potential, just as mine did for me. Today’s education system doesn’t do that; it’s modeled after a factory and is built to standardize the way we teach and test. The problem with this is that every child has different learning needs at different times. If we hope to educate each child effectively–an imperative in today’s society–then we need a system that can customize to meet each child’s unique needs. With the growth of online learning–a disruptive innovation–we stand at an unprecedented moment in human history where education is being transformed. If we leverage this innovation properly, over the next decade, we will be able to deliver a high-quality, customized learning experience to all children no matter their circumstances and transform not just the delivery of education, but the hopes, dreams, and realities for all children.
Michael B. Horn is the cofounder and Education Executive Director of Innosight Institute (http://www.innosightinstitute.org/), a non-profit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to solve problems in the social sector. He is the coauthor of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (http://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Class-Expanded-Edition-Disruptive/dp/0071749101/). Tech&Learning magazine named him to its list of the 100 most important people in the creation and advancement of the use of technology in education.
About TEDx, x = independently organized event
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized. (Subject to certain rules and regulations.)

Rob Glass:

Editor’s note:
The following is excerpted from “an urgent call to action” the superintendent of Bloomfield Hills Schools dispatched to parents and residents in his public school district this week.)
A package of bills designed to corporatize and dismantle public education is being hastily pushed through this current lame-duck legislative session. If we do not take immediate action, I believe great damage will be done to public education, including our school system.
We have just three weeks to take action before it’s too late. The bills are:
House Bill 6004 and Senate Bill 1358: Would expand a separate and statewide school district (the Education Achievement Authority) overseen by a governor-appointed chancellor and functioning outside the authority of the State Board of Education or state school superintendent. These schools are exempt from the same laws and quality measures of community-governed public schools. The EAA can seize unused school buildings (built and financed by local taxpayers) and force sale or lease to charter, nonpublic or EAA schools.

Bloomfield Hills’ 2013 budget is $82,233,213 for 6,772 students, or $12,143/student. Madison plans to spend $15,132/student during the 2012-2013 school year.

Josh Lederman:

Open your notebooks and sharpen your pencils. School for thousands of public school students is about to get quite a bit longer.
Five states were to announce on Monday that they will add at least 300 hours of learning time to the calendar in some schools starting in 2013. Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee will take part in the initiative, which is intended to boost student achievement and make U.S. schools more competitive on a global level.
The three-year pilot program will affect almost 20,000 students in 40 schools, with long-term hopes of expanding the program to include additional schools — especially those that serve low-income communities. Schools, working in concert with districts, parents and teachers, will decide whether to make the school day longer, add more days to the school year or both.

Andrew Rotherham:

Harriet Sanford of the NEA Foundation discusses the idea of rounds – like medical students – and more generally at the problem of reform churn. The idea of rounds and clinical-style training for new teachers has a lot of merit, but more generally it seems everyone wants education to be like medicine – or law. The “new” idea for a “bar exam” for teachers (Albert Shanker floated the concept in 1985) modeled on how they do it in the legal field is back in the news as the AFT rolls it out as a new initiative.
But a few questions don’t get asked enough. Perhaps most importantly, what if education isn’t really like law or medicine? What if it’s more like other professions, say journalism, public policy, or business where credentials are valued but weighed alongside other factors because there isn’t a field-wide core of knowledge or skills all practitioners must have? It’s a narrow view of “professional” these days that brings you back to just law and medicine.
And what if we don’t know as much as we like to presuppose? We don’t ask enough about the limits today. In early-childhood reading or special education, there is some professional knowledge that’s established and (sometimes) reflected in credentialing regimes. What truly makes a great 10th-grade English teacher or 12th grade government teacher? Outside of content knowledge, that’s less clear. My colleagues Sara Mead, Rachael Brown, and I recently looked at this issue in the context of teacher evaluations in this paper but, it’s a broader one.

Maisie McAdoo:

High School Progress Reports, which the Department of Education released on Nov. 26, have yet another new way to measure schools: the college and career readiness index, which now counts for 10 percent of a school’s grade.
As if the 2011 reports, at 205 columns of Excel data per school was not enough, the 2012 reports arrived on a 305-column spreadsheet, boasting 39 new columns of college and career readiness data points. That doesn’t count the “additional information,” 72 columns of supplemental data, in case the first 39 didn’t quite get at everything you wanted to know about college readiness.
Give them points for trying. But some of this data is going to wind up in “deleted items” and never get crunched.
Even the DOE didn’t try. It didn’t put out PowerPoint slides or anything that summarizes (or spins) the information.